Health Sites: Some Are More Equal Than Others

Update: Roni Zeiger of Google Health emailed me and gave permission for me to post the following statement, which I think is a helpful addition to the conversation:

Health information is obviously an important category of information users are looking for. For this health search feature we decided to offer users one source each from a governmental health agency, a medical institution, and a commercial site. We’ll study how users like these choices and continue to iterate. None of these sites is paying any money to Google to be included in the feature. Google is 100% committed to ranking websites objectively to provide the most relevant information to users. Websites cannot pay for higher search rank.

——————–

Eric Schmidt wants to solve health care’s “platform database problem” and one critic has  countered that “computers cannot practice medicine.” One of Google’s initiatives is to guide consumers to safe, trusted health websites. Is that such a bad thing?

Google’s search results can make or break a site or a business model, which is where dot-com blogs come in, but they also have the potential to make or break a consumer’s access to health information, which is where e-patients.net comes in.

First, some background. Search is central to health information gathering: Two-thirds of consumer health inquiries start at a general search engine. The trend line for consumers’ reliance on health search is so steady, in fact, that Pew Internet stopped updating it in 2006. Other researchers seem to take search dominance as an article of faith, too: Harris Interactive, Manhattan Research, Center for Studying Health System Change, National Cancer Institute’s HINTS — none have recent data on health search, at least on their public sites.

What has changed are the search results.

Google Health’s OneBox launched in August.  Instead of just featuring sites kicked out by the “democratic” PageRank algorithm, search results for “high blood pressure,” for example,  highlight information from A.D.A.M., Mayo Clinic, WebMD, or Medline Plus at the top of the results (well, almost the top: 3 paid advertisements or “sponsored” links appear first). Everything else is pushed down and out of the golden spotlight of the top results where consumers are likely to click. To paraphrase George Orwell, Google seems to have decided that all health sites are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Consumers do have other choices. According to Hitwise, Google garners 72.3% of U.S. searches; Yahoo 14.8%; and Bing 8.9%. A search on “high blood pressure” on Yahoo Health returns a combination of sponsored links and multiple articles from a single source: Healthwise. No algorithmically-generated results appear in the center well of Yahoo Health’s page.  Bing Health, which launched on Jan. 12, tops their search results with sponsored links, a box of Mayo Clinic links, and then a full set of algorithmically-generated links. Health search “verticals” are available, such as HONsearch and ResoundingHealth, but these are also stocked fishing ponds featuring chosen sites and content providers, not the open waters of the internet.

So what? Mayo/WebMD/Medline dominate the health information marketplace anyway, as measured by companies like comScore or HitWise. Consumers need trusted sources to help them navigate a new diagnosis. What’s the big deal?

I think it’s useful for consumers (as well as health info purveyors of all stripes) to note the changes and to talk about how powerful search results can be.

Here is one site’s story:

In 2001, NCHealthInfo.org launched as a model for the NIH’s Go Local initiative (there are now 35 such sites). North Carolina residents can find links to nearby health services as well as information related to local health topics (Southern Tick-Associated Illness) and general issues (nutrition).  I recently interviewed the site’s director, Christie Silbajoris, about how they garnered traffic for such a low-budget site.

Their strategy, in sum: Be first, be useful, then get out of users’ way.

The site is a honeypot of links in and out, which boosted their PageRank. The NC Health Info team was not sure what their audience would choose to research so they just kept uploading what they believed to be the best resources, attached robust metadata (keywords related to the page content), and Google blessed them with excellent placement. If you search for “health services glossary” for example, they are still among the top results. They also are a top result for searches on military health insurance and for diabetes info in Spanish, much to the surprise of the librarians who run the site. Now, however, they are losing ground and getting pushed down in the search results.

Is NC Health Info an artifact of history? Would a small site have a chance these days? If not, is that OK? Does the best information reside on the big player’s websites? Or is this another example of the Googlization of Everything?

More broadly, I wonder if curated search results are the answer to the ongoing debate over information quality. Pew Internet research shows that consumers are not likely to check the source and date of health information found online. I have often advised people who are concerned about that finding to “go where the users are” (ie, search sites). As I said at the top: Search sites are now guiding consumers to safe, trusted health websites.

What do you think? Is this is helpful to consumers or not? Please add your comments to the e-patients.net post or send me comments via Twitter.